Saturday, August 30, 2014

Gamer, and Proud

Apparently, I’m dying; this is nothing to fret over because
as a straight, white, heterosexual, well adjusted, career oriented, “Can-ist”
(definition to come), atheist, alcohol drinking, muscle car driving,
anti-environmental male my many privileges dictate I don’t feel things the same
way everyone else does, so my death should be a fairly tame experience, akin to
Master Yoda in Return of Jedi. I think I
like that idea.

Before I forget, and before the tumblr social justice mafia
(TSJM) gets its hands on the term, I define “Can-ist” as follows: A person or
group of people who answer life’s only relevant question (Can you <x>?)
with “Yes” more often than “No…”. Here
are some examples: Can you get out of bed today? Can you make it to the front door? Can you drive to work? I’m a very definite can-ist.

Okay, back to the Alexander article. You can read the whole thing if you’d like
via the link above. I’m going to touch
on a couple of things.

Now
part of a writer’s job in a creative, human medium is to help curate a creative
community and an inclusive culture -- and a lack of commitment to that just
looks out-of-step, like a partial compromise with the howling trolls who’ve
latched onto ‘ethics’ as the latest flag in their onslaught against evolution
and inclusion.

Let’s start with inclusion.
Inclusion and inclusive principles have failed in every endeavor in which
they have been tried. Inclusive
principles are 0/1 lifetime, having destroyed the American public education system
by the only measurable that matters: The United States’ scientific,
technological, economic, and military advantage over its enemies. One might ask about inclusion in corporate
settings. Having an employee group for
each race plus an LGBTA employee group is neither diversity nor inclusion;
however, the existence of those groups does tend to check enough boxes to get a
company diversity awards. Inclusion, the
way it was taught to me as I was being educated to be an educator in the
mid-90s in Wisconsin, was a construct by which we made every student roughly
equal at a level slightly worse than average.
It was verboten to take a student with aptitude in a subject, push that
student to his/her limits, and cultivate a love for whatever subject that student
showed aptitude in. Inclusion and
inclusive principles are the reason for assessments via standardized testing. Those assessments are tied to funding, which
force educators away from teaching subjects, life skills, and critical
thinking, in favor of teaching the content in the standardized tests.

So, let’s apply inclusion to gaming. Every game has to be slightly worse than
mediocre; let’s go to Metacritic media scores and get some hypotheticals to
compare our new PC gaming landscape to in terms of quality: Stronghold 3, Guns
of Icarus, Tactical Intervention, Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes,
Aliens: Colonial Marines, Watchmen: The End Is Nigh Part 2

Here are some of the things said about those games, just so
you get an idea of what the inclusive landscape looks like from the quality
perspective:

It
feels rushed and it's probably only good as a reminder how unapproachable team
shooters have been at the turn of the millennium.

Half-cooked,
bereft of ideas and technically despicable, this would-be triple-A production
is an overblown movie tie-in to a flick you wouldn't want to see.

The
game may be long but every level seems the same as the last, making it feel
more like a repetitive endurance run than a game.

I
thought I would've been more engaged in both campaigns, but I felt that both
modes were pretty bland. Yes, it had its fun moments but they were few and far
between.

The
fights are fun, but the same opponents and surroundings become boring very
fast. There's no story to speak of, which is a shame…

Funny that last quote mentions story, because in the
inclusive landscape all characters, narratives, settings, and plots must be
vetted through the TSJM, or the developers and publishers take the risk of the
TSJM and their merry band of writers? (Leigh’s words, not mine) will inundate the
gaming blogosphere (it isn’t journalism at this point) with pejorative
invectives that, true or not, might affect the bottom line for game and company. In an environment where taking a shot at making
a game and missing is becoming totally unforgiving, would anyone blame a
developer or publisher for not taking any risks in our hypothetical gaming
landscape? So every character, plot and
narrative in every game is gender and race neutral, non-culture-appropriating,
non-violent (accept maybe exclusively toward men?), and inoffensive to everyone. There’s the inclusive gaming landscape—look hard:
beige on beige with beige highlights, and this is the soundtrack.

Okay enough fear mongering, and let’s get back on
point. The other thing I wanted to touch
on from the quote above is a difference between being a writer in the context of
a content creator and being a writer in the context of being a journalist. There is, in fact, a huge difference between
the two. So, yes, I agree completely
that if Leigh Alexander as a content creator wants to curate a creative
community and an inclusive culture, by all means, do so. On the other hand, when one is a journalist,
she/he has an obligation to present information in a factual and truthful
manner. That obligation is born from a
trust relationship established between the journalist and the consumers of the
journalist’s work. I’ve been personally
involved in broadcast media off and on for 20 years, and to see the obligation
of the journalist to the consumer cast aside so flippantly is nothing short of
repugnant.

Let’s apply this to current events. If Anita Sarkeesian gets
crowd source funding to make a video series on tropes about women in video
games, by all means report on it. If Anita Sarkeesian is being harassed or
getting death threats for making the video series, by all means, report on it
factually. If someone wants to tack the
Op-Ed tag on 10 pages about how terrible it is that anyone would have suffer such
abuse, please do. In fact, write as many
op-eds as you’d like on any topic you’d like; so long as the work has the op-ed
tag on it, push any agenda your heart desires, Leigh.

However, when there’s information that starts to surface about
inconsistencies in the
narrative Anita Sarkeesian sells to people publicly and the narrative she tells
people elsewhere, isn’t it our responsibility to ask some questions? Which narrative is true: the narrative that
Anita has played video games since she was 5, or the narrative that Anita is not a fan of video games [12:50]? That question is not misogyny; that question is
not sexism; and in no way does that question undermine the work she is trying
to do with Tropes vs. Women. The follow up questions might lead us to
discover that Anita Sarkeesian is talking about video games exclusively as a
function of profitability. How can we know unless the questions are
asked in an environment safe from labeling as misogynists, sexists, trolls, or
harassers? The point is that there are
questions that the gaming journalist community has an obligation to ask to get
facts about the creator of Tropes vs. Women,
and the gaming journalist community is refusing to do it.

Finally, what was totally missed in the Alexander article
altogether, is that this gamer, among others, has something that every developer and every
publisher wants, regardless of social justice agendas: disposable
income, and lots of it. So, while Leigh might
wish to decry hyper-consumerism, capitalist pigdogs, and so on, gamers are on prowl for games. Our wants are brutally
simple—the games have to be good: compelling story, interesting characters,
consistent mechanics, challenging but beatable, innovative in moderation, and graphically
and auditorily palatable. It’s no more
complicated than that.

My name is Todd Wohling; I podcast, post, and stream under
the handle Octale; and yes, Leigh, I am a gamer. I have been a gamer since 1979; I am a gamer today;
and I will be a gamer for a long, long time to come. I don’t
need your, Dan
Golding’s, Mike
Pearl’s, or anyone else’s approval to call myself one.

P.S. I’m not suggesting that a gaming journalist abandon
class and decorum to go pester Anita Sarkeesian in
the middle of a real personal crisis about inconsistencies in how she’s
sold her gaming background relative to Tropes
vs. Women. That can obviously wait
until all issues surrounding the safety of Anita and her family, and the
security of her home are resolved. To me, this is self-evident, but on further thought, I felt it should be said.

P.S2. It is deplorable that any gaming news site would
pre-emptively cut off discourse about topics in gaming. I suppose you have to
give Tim Colwill and games.on.net credit for having the courage to come out and
say
they aren’t interested organizationally in being journalists. So, thanks
Tim, I have one less place to waste my time when I am looking for legitimate,
bias free gaming news and commentary.

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